Email Audiences

Email Audiences List

In order to send out a mass email campaign, you need a way to determine to whom you’re sending the messages. An email list is called an Audience in NeonCRM. Before you can send any email blasts, you must first have an audience. All NeonCRM systems come with an audience called All Emails, which consists of all accounts in your database with an email address.

This page shows all of the available email audiences. From here, you can configure existing audiences, delete them, and see a summary of how many active contacts are on the list, how many have errors and are unavailable for emailing, and how many constituents have unsubscribed from a list.

You can sort by Name, number of active, errored and unsubscribed emails, as well as by the date the audience was created and updated.

Audience Types

There are three types of audiences you can create:

Standard Email Audiences

A Standard Email Audience can contain accounts from your NeonCRM database as well as simple email lists. This means you can search your NeonCRM database using the report tool to build an email list, narrowing the results by any criteria in the system. You can also import a simple email list, or connect a general distribution list into the audience.

To create a standard audience, click New Audience at the top of the Email Audiences List. Select Standard Email Audience in the Audience Type section. The name and description fields are for internal reference only.

When your emails are successfully loaded into the system, you will see the total number of addresses in the Email List Import Results:

At this point, you have the option to add the same list of emails to other existing audiences, or just to the current audience:

Either way, you must click "Build Campaign Audience" to add the imported emails to your list.

Note: Importing an email list to an audience does not create Neon accounts for those constituents, nor does it link the imported emails to existing Neon accounts. Imported email lists cannot be linked to existing Neon accounts. To track email communication history of a constituent, you must add their account to the audience using a database search, as described below.

*2) Add New Search

You can add NeonCRM accounts to an audience using a database search. This is the only way to add existing Neon accounts to an email audience, and is therefore the recommended method for building email audiences in Neon. The advantages of adding accounts to an audience are listed below.

Advantages of adding Neon accounts to an audience using a database search:

Adding a database search is ideal because it allows you to track your communications with constituents directly from their Neon account under Email Communication History.

You can utilize email tokens when sending a campaign email to an audience built using a database search.

Since this is the only way to add Neon accounts to an Email Audience, the database search is the only option that will enable your audience to dynamically update based on constituent account & transaction data.

Clicking Add New Search brings up the reporting interface, which allows you to filter your constituents by a specified search criteria and add the results to your audience. Learn more about the reporting module here.

You will notice that the report comes with pre-loaded search fields. Edit these fields to add additional criteria.

If you clear the default search criteria, Neon will still prevent you from adding any unsubscribed accounts to your audience.

Load the desired criteria then click Save Changes then, Run Report.

From the report results page, you can continue to refine your criteria by returning to Configure Report.

You can select a general distribution email list and add it to an audience. Click Add Distribution List and choose one or more existing distribution list to add it to an audience. This is useful for tying a web signup form for a email list to a standard audience.

4) Add Email Address

Adding email addresses manually can be accomplished by clicking Add Email Address and entering in the information of the contact. This does NOT create a NeonCRM account for the contact.

Distribution List

A Distribution List is a basic list of email addresses and names. This is used simply as a email list. When one of these is published, NeonCRM generates a web page with a signup form, as well as a code snippet that you can use to embed a signup form into your website. NeonCRM does not create accounts for the individuals that subscribe to a general distribution list.

To create a general distribution list, create a new Audience, and for Audience Type, select Distribution List.

You can add email addresses to this list by importing, typing them in manually, or publishing the list to generate a web form.

A distribution list can be published, which generates a signup form and/or signup code to be embedded in a website. Clicking Publish makes this happen.

Once published, Neon generates a Subscription Link

Click the Code Snippets link to get code that can be used to embed this signup form in any web page. If you Un-Publish the audience, the signup form for this list is deactivated.

Email Subscription Confirmation Email

When a constituent signs up for a distribution list, they see the following message on the exit page:

"Thank you for signing up to receive emails. You will be sent a confirmation email shortly. Once you follow the link in that email, you will be subscribed."

Report-Only List

A Report-Only List is made up of NeonCRM accounts only and can only be used to push emails to MailChimp. You cannot import email lists to this type of audience. You can only add constituents to this list by running a search of your NeonCRM database. This type of email audience is most commonly used for passing data to MailChimp. While all audience types can be sent to MailChimp, this is the only type that can send custom field data.

This will present you with a choice of which type to use, either use the standard Email Audience Report or select another type of Neon report.

Search Constituent Contact Information: This uses the Email Audience Report, the same report used for Standard Audiences. If selected, you will be given the standard report criteria selection screen. This type of search is useful for finding constituents based on their contact information. It most closely resembles an All Accounts report.

Select My Own Report Type: This allows you to add accounts to your audience using any report type you like. if selected, then you can choose any report type from NeonCRM. You might select this because you want to pull constituents based on transaction data.

Tip: Regardless of the report type you select, you must remember that you have to select the columns you want to be available for use in your email. Therefore, it is recommended to always select the columns Account ID, First Name, Last Name, and Email Address.

After you have run your search and received the results you are looking for, click Save Email List.

As mentioned before, you must include a column for Email, Account ID, First Name, and Last Name. On this screen you tell NeonCRM which columns correspond to those particular email audience fields.

Sending Messages

Once your Audience is populated, you can begin sending an email blast from the audience detail page. Under the Email List section, click Choose Campaign Email.This will re-direct you to the Send Campaign Emails utility where you are prompted to select the Campaign Email you wish to send. Only emails that have not been sent to this audience will be available to select.

After selecting an email to send and confirming the audience to send it to, you can either schedule the message to go out in the future or send it immediately.

Send on: [future date] - the email will be sent by the Nightly Scheduler around 5:00 AM Central Time on the date you have specified.